Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  Here was the crazy myopia of FitzRoy’s vision, fueled and abetted by Britain’s expansionist aspirations and its own special relationship with God: three little wigwams raised against the williwaws of Cape Horn, each fixed up inside as an English drawing room, in which York, Jemmy, and Fuegia would repose, in their tailcoats and cravats and bonnet, with Matthews in the third wigwam to lead them in Sunday services. If such a thing was possible, what might not have grown from it? This was FitzRoy’s dream, and he had pursued it with the energy of Alexander.

  The boats traveled north from Goree Road and entered the Beagle Channel. This remarkable, two- to three-mile-wide, nearly straight, easily navigable waterway running east-west for 120 miles between high mountains, had been discovered by Murray, the Beagle’s master on the previous voyage.

  Darwin’s doubts about the venture didn’t prevent him from enjoying the outing or the constantly magnificent scenery.

  In our little fleet we glided along, till we found in the evening a corner snugly concealed by small islands.—Here we pitched out tents & lighted our fires.—nothing could look more romantic than this scene.—the glassy water of the cove & the boats at anchor; the tents supported by the oars & the smoke curling up the wooded valley formed a picture of quiet & retirement.

  It was like a camping scene by the American painter-franchiser Thomas Kincaid, whose lurid sublimity and mossy palette would be just right for the exaggerated picturesqueness of Tierra del Fuego.

  As the group pulled west along the channel the next day, Fuegians appeared on the shore. They gaped at the cruisers in astonishment and ran for miles beside the channel to keep up with the boats. The Beagle Channel does not appear to have been noticed by voyagers before Murray came upon it in 1830; it would have been out of the way and unknown to the sealing and whaling vessels that frequented the region’s ocean coasts or the Strait of Magellan, so it’s probable that many of the Fuegians who saw the Englishmen in their boats that day had never seen any but their own people before. Fires sprang up all along the coast, both to attract the strangers’ attention and to spread the news of their presence. For Darwin, the Fuegians delivered another gothic-opera spectacle:

  I shall never forget how savage & wild one group was.—Four or five men suddenly appeared on a cliff near us.—they were absolutely naked & with long streaming hair; springing from the ground & waving their arms around their heads, they sent forth the most hideous yells. Their appearance was so strange, that it was scarcely like that of earthly inhabitants.

  The Anglicized Fuegians traveling with the Englishmen thought no better of these people than the group they had met a few weeks earlier in Good Success Bay. “Large monkeys,” York Minster called them, laughing at them with what to FitzRoy must have been a dispiriting lack of Christian feeling. (Since there were no monkeys in Tierra del Fuego, York could only have acquired this derogatory comparison in England, and it’s not hard to imagine how.) Jemmy Button assured the captain that these people were greatly inferior to his own, who were “very good and very clean.”

  It was Fuegia Basket who had the strongest reaction to the sight of her countrymen in their original state—her first in two and a half years, since she hadn’t come ashore with the others at Good Success Bay. She was plainly terrified. After two years of total immersion among the most fragrant of English sensibilities, she was shocked at their nakedness and brute appearance. She may also have felt an acute embarrassment: this was who and what she really was. She had been lifted out of this, taken to another world and given the profoundest makeover. But now she was being returned to starkest heathendom—it is nowhere recorded whether she was pleased to come back or not—to be left here with a chest full of dresses and petticoats, some tea trays, and her great hulking twenty-eight-year-old suitor York Minster. Fuegia was still only twelve years old at the most, an intuitive, clever girl to be sure. But such attributes may not have helped her at this moment, when dumb ignorance might have been preferable. Her grasp of all that had happened to her, and was about to, can only be guessed at. FitzRoy, with his tunnel vision, so ready to believe what he wanted to believe, is our only witness to her feelings. He wrote: “Fuegia was shocked and ashamed; she hid herself, and would not look at them [the wailing wild men ashore] a second time.”

  Two days farther westward along the Beagle Channel, the convoy passed below what is now the port of Ushuaia. That evening, in a cove at the north end of the Murray Narrows, they met a small group of “Tekeenica” Fuegians. They were members of Jemmy Button’s tribe, whom he remembered, and they remembered him.

  Both FitzRoy, and therefore Darwin and others, described Jemmy’s tribe as the Yapoo Tekeenica, or the Yapoo division of the Tekeenica tribe. It’s not clear where FitzRoy got this, though he wrote that he believed he had heard Boat Memory and York Minster referring to the Fuegians of this area as Yapoos on the previous voyage. But he was mistaken. The tribe, and Jemmy Button, actually called themselves Yamana. Lucas Bridges, son of the missionary Thomas Bridges, who later established a mission at Ushuaia and produced a 32,000-word Yamana-English dictionary, explained such a misunderstanding in his book Uttermost Part of the Earth.

  It is interesting to note how many names have arisen through mistakes and even become permanent by finding their way into Admiralty charts. Early historians tell us of a place called Yaapooh, and speak of the people of that country. No such place or people existed, and this word is simply a corruption of the Yaghan [Yamana] name for otter, iapooh. No doubt FitzRoy, pointing towards a distant shore, asked what it was called. The [Fuegian’s] keen eyes would spy an otter, and he would answer with the word, “Iapooh.”

  In all the charts of this country—both Spanish and English—a certain sound in Hoste Island bears the name Tekenika. The Indians had no such name for that or any other place, but the word in the Yaghan tongue means “difficult or awkward to see or understand.” No doubt the bay was pointed out to a native, who, when asked the name of it, answered, “Teke uneka,” implying, “I don’t understand what you mean,” and down went the name “Tekenika.”

  Much of what FitzRoy “learned” from his dealings with Fuegians must be set against misunderstandings like this—and his reliance on translators who were frequently under coercion.

  Although they were his people, Jemmy found he had forgotten much of his native language and had trouble understanding them. York Minster, though from another tribe, did better and acted as a translator. In this way, Jemmy heard the news that his father had died. He had already had a “dream in his head” to that effect, wrote Darwin, so he seemed unsurprised, but according to FitzRoy, he looked “grave” at this news, went and found some green branches, which he burned with a solemn look. After that, he returned to his usual, cheerful self.

  In the morning, a large number of natives arrived at the cove as the Englishmen were breaking camp. Many had run so fast over the mountains from Woollya (now Wulaia) that blood was streaming from their noses. Their mouths foamed as they talked, feverishly lobbing questions at Jemmy and the others. Bleeding, frothing at the mouth, gasping for breath, painted white, red, and black, they looked like “so many demoniacs” according to Darwin.

  These were all “Tekeenicas,” natives of southeastern Tierra del Fuego according to FitzRoy, who believed he saw marked differences between them and other Fuegians. These were

  low in stature, ill-looking, and badly proportioned. Their colour is that of very old mahogany, or rather between dark copper, and bronze. The trunk of the body is large, in proportion to their cramped and rather crooked limbs. Their rough, coarse, and extremely dirty black hair half hides yet heightens a villanous expression of the worst description of savage features.

  This is FitzRoy’s standard description of all Fuegians in the wild, no matter where he saw them. It was how he saw the ungodly savage anywhere. It fitted not only his own drawing of Jemmy Button, a “Tekeenica,” after the ameliorating influences of his stay in England had worn off and left his features coarsened as
of old, but also his later drawings of Maoris in New Zealand, whose lips curl threateningly and whose expressions are uniformly villainous. “Satires upon mankind” was FitzRoy’s summing up of the physiognomy of Tekeenica men. He was no more generous with the women.

  They are short, with bodies largely out of proportion to their height; their features, especially those of the old, are scarcely less disagreeable than the repulsive ones of these men. About four feet and some inches is the stature of these she-Fuegians—by courtesy called women.

  As the Englishmen’s convoy got underway, they were joined by more natives on the water.

  In a very short time there were thirty or forty canoes in our train, each full of natives, each with a column of blue smoke rising from the fire amidships, and almost all the men in them shouting at the full power of their deep sonorous voices. As we pursued a winding course around the bases of high rocks or between islets covered with wood, continual additions were made to our attendents; and the day being very fine, without a breeze to ruffle the water, it was a scene which carried one’s thoughts to the South Sea Islands, but in Tierra del Fuego almost appeared like a dream.

  So this flotilla passed through the Murray Narrows to Woollya, the place where Jemmy Button had first been taken from a canoe. As they reached Ponsonby Sound at the southern end of the narrows, Jemmy recognized where he was. He now guided the boats into the quiet cove where he had once lived. There were only a few natives ashore. The women ran away, the remaining men nervously watched the boats land.

  FitzRoy was immediately happy with the look of the place.

  Rising gently from the waterside, there [were] considerable spaces of clear pasture land, well-watered by brooks, and backed by hills of moderate height, where we afterwards found woods of the finest timber trees in the country. Rich grass and some beautiful flowers, which none of us had ever seen, pleased us when we landed, and augured well for the growth of our garden seeds.

  The English sailors pulled hard to stay ahead of the following canoes. As soon as they were ashore, the marines marked a boundary line on the ground with spades and spaced themselves out to guard the enclosed site on which the seamen now set to work erecting the settlement’s wigwams and digging a garden. The canoes began arriving, and more natives gathered on the shore. York and Jemmy were kept busy explaining to them the meaning of the boundary line, and what was happening, and the natives squatted down to watch.

  Woollya, just below Murray Narrows, Ponsonby Sound. The site of FitzRoy’s, and others’, hoped-for New Jerusalem in Tierra del Fuego. (Narrative of HMS Adventure and Beagle, by Robert FitzRoy)

  In the evening, a deep, booming voice was heard around the cove, coming from a canoe far down the sound. Jemmy recognized it instantly: “My brother!” he said. He abandoned the nails and tools he had been distributing, and scrambled onto a large rock to watch the canoe approach. It held, along with his stentorian brother, three younger brothers, two sisters, and his mother. The canoe was a long time in reaching the cove, and when it arrived, the family reunion was a strange one. His mother and sisters barely looked at him before running off to hide, Fuegian fashion. The brothers approached Jemmy slowly, their once naked brother now returned as fancy and particular about his dress as Phileas Fogg, and circled him wordlessly, like dogs sniffing a stranger. Jemmy stole glances at his English friends and suffered a mortification known in all cultures: he was embarrassed by his family. But the Englishmen were delighted, and the family immediately became “The Buttons,” Jemmy’s two older brothers becoming Tommy and Harry (in some accounts Billy) Button. At last Jemmy tried to speak to them. Darwin observed this meeting.

  It was pitiable, but laughable, to hear him talk to his brother in English & ask him in Spanish whether he understood it. I do not suppose, any person exists with such a small stock of language as poor Jemmy, his own language forgotten, & his English ornamented with a few Spanish words, almost unintelligible.

  The thronging natives left the English camp at sunset, to set up their own fires and wigwams a quarter of a mile away. During the evening, Jemmy spent time with his mother and family, and York and Fuegia went visiting from wigwam to wigwam, explaining their presence, and the Englishmen’s intention of establishing a settlement at Woollya. This seemed to have a calming effect on the locals, who appeared more relaxed the next day.

  For the next four days, until January 27, the Englishmen worked at preparing the settlement that Matthews, York, Fuegia, and Jemmy were to call home. They gave them the best the Royal Navy and missionary zeal could provide. The sailors erected three homes. These were called wigwams, fashioned, like the native enclosures, of saplings and thatched with grass and twigs, but probably also wrapped with sailcloth and girded and strengthened with rope. Built by the ship’s carpenters, riggers, sailmakers, bosuns, and seamen used to arranging the ingenious mechanical devices aboard a ship to their liking, they were substantial structures, built to last as long as possible, far superior to the makeshift, temporary, and transportable wigwams of the natives. Matthews’s new home had both an attic made with boards to house his abundant stores, and a “cellar”—a pit beneath the floorboards—to secrete his more valuable possessions.

  Near the wigwams, the seamen stepped off a good-sized plot and dug, planted, and sowed a kitchen garden of potatoes, carrots, turnips, beans, peas, lettuce, onions, leeks, and cabbages. The British were then a nation of gardeners—farmers, crofters, fruit and flower growers. Apart from its fast-diminishing forests, Britain was almost entirely under cultivation, and a green thumb lay dormant or active in every Briton. These Beagle gardeners probably longed, as seamen chronically do, for a home and garden of their own, or had them, far away, tended by a wife or family member. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British Navy and merchant service were often the only possibility of employment for young men from an expanding and overpopulated rural labor force who sought a living on farms or from their own smallholdings, whose only alternative was to look for work in densely overcrowded cities. The loving care these seamen expended on creating this English country garden for a few savages in remote Tierra del Fuego cannot be overestimated; the exchange of tips and advice coming from grizzled salts resembling the Bounty mutineers would have been as dedicated and earnest, authoritative and argumentative, as any gathering of the Royal Horticultural Society.

  Around this industry, Fuegians continued to gather and watch. Over the next few days their numbers grew to more than 300. Interaction between them and the Englishmen was initially harmonious, but there were constant attempts at thievery and incessant importuning with the word the English transliterated as “Yammerschooner.” (According to Thomas Bridges’s Yamana-English dictionary, yamask-una means “Do be liberal to me.”) “The last & first word is sure to be ‘Yammerschooner,’” wrote Darwin. The Englishmen gave them small presents but these were never enough. “It is very easy to please but as difficult to make them content…. they asked for everything they saw & stole what they could.”

  After several days, the pilfering grew bolder, and on January 26 there occurred several hostile incidents when a few older Fuegian men tried to force their way into the English encampment. One of them, rebuffed by a sentry from the site boundary, spat in the seaman’s face and then pantomimed killing, skinning, and cutting up a man. FitzRoy was already concerned that his increasingly outnumbered party of thirty-odd men could be overwhelmed if the mood turned sour—the death of Captain Cook at the hands of his former devotees in Hawaii in 1779 cast a long shadow over subsequent relations between English seamen and aboriginal natives—so that evening he set the marines to some target practice with their muskets. The Fuegians watched this keenly, squatting on their haunches around the boundary like spectators at a fireworks display. FitzRoy had the targets arranged “so that they could see the effects of the balls.” The natives were duly impressed, and afterward went off to their own camps, “looking very grave and talking earnestly.”

  The next morning, a
s the final thatching went into the wigwams, nearly all the Fuegians, including the Buttons, broke up their camps and paddled away or disappeared over the surrounding hills. Only half a dozen men were still too curious to leave. The English wondered if they’d been frightened off by the target practice, or whether an attack was being planned. FitzRoy decided to avoid any possibility of a conflict by withdrawing his men and marines to another cove a few miles away. Rather boldly, he also decided to leave Matthews and his three Fuegians to spend their first night—unguarded, with all their goods and stores—in the new wigwams. York and Jemmy both told FitzRoy that they were sure they would come to no harm, and Matthews appeared as steady and trusting as ever. The captain was impressed by his stoicism. At sunset, the four boats paddled away, leaving the settlers behind.

  FitzRoy passed a sleepless night.

  I could not help being exceedingly anxious about Matthews, and early next morning our boats were again steered towards Woollya. My own anxiety was increased by hearing the remarks made from time to time by the rest of the party, some of whom thought we should not again see him alive; and it was with no slight joy that I caught sight of him, as my boat rounded a point of land, carrying a kettle to the fire near his wigwam. We landed and ascertained that nothing had occurred to damp his spirits, or in any way check his inclination to make a fair trial. Some natives had returned to the place, among them one of Jemmy’s brothers; but so far were they from showing the slightest ill-will, that nothing could be more friendly than their behaviour.